Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
Speaker 1: much for tuning in. Who's that regular man on the moon?
Speaker 1: Why it's none other than our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2: Max Moonman Williams. Yes, a lunar tic if ever there was.
Speaker 2: You are Noel Brown. Yeah, I've never been to the Moon.
Speaker 2: I don't even think it's real, to be honest.
Speaker 1: And I am Ben Bollen. Oh thanks, who.
Speaker 2: Very much believes in the reality of the moon. If
Speaker 2: I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh. You know, everybody has these childhood dreams of
Speaker 1: what they will be when they grow up, and once
Speaker 1: upon a time, true story, nol I aspired to be
Speaker 1: the first werewolf on the moon.
Speaker 2: Figure it out. Yeah, how are you planning on getting
Speaker 2: getting like anthropy, getting the bite? How are you going
Speaker 2: to expose yourself to this malady?
Speaker 1: Well, that's what they would call a sunk cost, that
Speaker 1: malign in particular. The idea was if you're always on
Speaker 1: the moon, then you're not, you know, vulnerable to the
Speaker 1: various downfalls of like anthropy. But you'll riddle me this,
Speaker 1: what do we get when we cross an aspiring astronaut
Speaker 1: whirlwind summer fleeting, shout out to our research associate, the
Speaker 1: one and only Jordan, and a safe full of priceless
Speaker 1: moon rocks.
Speaker 2: What do we get? We get ridiculous history, Ben, I
Speaker 2: think you know that. And can I also just say
Speaker 2: that I do believe that the moon exists. I just
Speaker 2: had to make that mention because I recently met a
Speaker 2: fellow who said he did not believe that the moon existed,
Speaker 2: not that the moon landing was faked, but that the
Speaker 2: moon itself is entirely a fraud perpetrated on the people
Speaker 2: of Earth.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, by whom who knows?
Speaker 1: They Ah capital they capital t They.
Speaker 2: Already got it. We got we got a wild ride
Speaker 2: for you today, folks. Combines some elements of a heist.
Speaker 2: You know, we love a heist, some history, some science fact.
Speaker 2: Maybe a little science fiction will sprinkling there just for
Speaker 2: the hell of it. But man, Jordan really found us
Speaker 2: a dinger, as they said in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, twenty three, scould do on you, Jordan Research Associate. God,
Speaker 1: that guy's a legend. I love hanging out with him.
Speaker 1: Jordan has introduced us to a guy named Thad Roberts. Now,
Speaker 1: Thad is very good at physics, and Thad is also
Speaker 1: super in love with his girlfriend and he really wants
Speaker 1: to impress her. He borrows a jeep, he wears a
Speaker 1: scuba suit. He gets sort of into indus shenanigans. And
Speaker 1: this is also a story about moon rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is that and his uh which you might
Speaker 2: call a ragtag crew of interns. Jr. Jordan rentag our
Speaker 2: Boy describes them as horny interns. We'll get to that
Speaker 2: pulled off what should have been the perfect caper for
Speaker 2: this our space age, and it does involve stealing and
Speaker 2: attempting to fence lunar rocks, which triggered a man hunt
Speaker 2: skiing operation and ended up with some serious jail times.
Speaker 2: So strap in no pun intended for sex on the Moon.
Speaker 2: A tale of romance, ambition, federal charges, and geology. It's
Speaker 2: gonna rock your very ridiculous world.
Speaker 3: Get it rock. That was George's joke. I thought that
Speaker 3: was cool.
Speaker 1: There are only two ways to get rocks from the moon, okay,
Speaker 1: and only one of those ways is legal. Either they
Speaker 1: come to you on Earth or you go to them
Speaker 1: via something like the Apollo program and purposely pick them up.
Speaker 1: So with that former definition, scientists here on Earth, without
Speaker 1: leaving the planet, have collected something north of two two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds worth of lunar material that just
Speaker 1: sort of crashed on Earth's surface at some point in
Speaker 1: time as meteorites. And most of these things are going
Speaker 1: to be recovered from Antarctica, Northern Africa, deserts in western Asia,
Speaker 1: or what you would call the Middle.
Speaker 2: East remote mainly inhospitable regions. The rest were obtained that
Speaker 2: second way, which we'll call the hard way, from the
Speaker 2: surface of the very real Moon itself. The first and
Speaker 2: biggest batch were recovered during like you said, Ben America's
Speaker 2: Apollo program. And how appropriate that I am joined in
Speaker 2: my podcast studio by none other than my very sweet
Speaker 2: little space boy, Apollo, the toy poodle. So Apollo gives
Speaker 2: you a little puppy wave. They were the astronauts that
Speaker 2: is able to bring back a whopping twenty two hundred
Speaker 2: samples weighing in at eight hundred and forty two pounds
Speaker 2: over the course of six missions between the years nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty nine and nineteen seventy two, and these Moon fragments,
Speaker 2: which span the geological spectrum from various sizes and grades
Speaker 2: of material rocks to pebbles to sand to dust, are
Speaker 2: stored very gingerly in controlled, highly controlled situations, including nitrogen
Speaker 2: filled cabinets at NASA's Lunar Curation Lab, which is a
Speaker 2: thing in order to avoid contamination and oxidization from Earth's atmosphere,
Speaker 2: not to mention to potentially contain some space germs that
Speaker 2: people were real worried about for a while, but more
Speaker 2: on that later.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the oxidation, as we'll see, is the primary concern.
Speaker 1: Note again, what we're saying here, folks, Again, it's two
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds worth of moon stuff that landed on Earth,
Speaker 1: and it's eight hundred and forty two pounds of stuff
Speaker 1: humans provably brought back from the Apollo program. The largest
Speaker 1: moon rock ever recovered from the Apollo missions is a
Speaker 1: twenty six pound chonky boy, so chonky that we call
Speaker 1: it Big Mulley, named in honor of the geology team
Speaker 1: leader of Apollo sixteen, Bill Muhlberger. There's another money to
Speaker 1: his friends, no doubt, Well, Big Mulley to his friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There is also the Genesis Rock, which is believed to
Speaker 1: be one of the oldest things humans know about from
Speaker 1: the surface of the Moon. It's somewhere between four and
Speaker 1: five billion years old, which we acknowledge is a heck
Speaker 1: of a margin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and let's not forget about the Soviets. They went
Speaker 2: up there too. They actually sent a dog up there,
Speaker 2: quite cruelly, poor little Laika, who didn't make it. Back.
Speaker 2: In the early seventies, a trio of unmanned Soviet robotic
Speaker 2: probes Douglas thankfully brought back ten point six ounces of
Speaker 2: material over the course of three missions. Not nearly as impressive.
Speaker 2: No shade on the Soviets. They were definitely, you know,
Speaker 2: in the space race, but this is not quite the
Speaker 2: hall that the emission brought back. More recently, in the
Speaker 2: twenty twenties, we've got China entering the Chat with two
Speaker 2: Unmann probes, bringing back around eight pounds of lunar material,
Speaker 2: including the very first from the story to Dark Side
Speaker 2: of the Moon, famous by the Pink Floyd album. Of note,
Speaker 2: of course, it's the only place that was made famous
Speaker 2: by that's not true. But the US, as we've mentioned,
Speaker 2: and as was probably pretty clear by now, possesses the
Speaker 2: vast majority of all this moon stuff. And for the
Speaker 2: purposes of this episode, we're gonna mainly be staying in
Speaker 2: the US.
Speaker 1: Yes, because we will get in trouble if we mentioned
Speaker 1: the Soviet or Chinese lunar possessions also like a gata space,
Speaker 1: but didn't get to the moon, because getting to the
Speaker 1: Moon is very, very difficult, Max, if you could give
Speaker 1: us some difficult music, something that gives us a sense
Speaker 1: of epic adventure.
Speaker 2: Perfect perhaps a little adversity, a little bit of tension there,
Speaker 2: I love.
Speaker 1: It, yeah, perfectly. So getting to the Moon is already
Speaker 1: a crazy endeavor. It is two hundred and thirty eight thousand,
Speaker 1: nine hundred miles from the Earth to the lunar surface
Speaker 1: and back, and both of those points, point A and
Speaker 1: point z are moving the entire time, right.
Speaker 2: And if you hear from people in your day to
Speaker 2: day lives who maybe are skeptical about the moon landing
Speaker 2: being real, something that we've covered at length on stuff
Speaker 2: that don't want you to know, a lot of the
Speaker 2: reasoning behind that is the absolute mammoth task that is
Speaker 2: going to and from the Moon, the logistics of it
Speaker 2: being bonkers, and what was available and possible in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties. It just seems sometimes on first glance that
Speaker 2: this was a way tall order for the technology of
Speaker 2: the time. And I do come down the side of
Speaker 2: you know, the moon landing was real, just for the record,
Speaker 2: but just putting that.
Speaker 1: Out there, all right, Well, it's good to dream, Brony.
Speaker 1: We all know the moon landings were real. There is
Speaker 1: provable evidence you can see with a proper telescope, right,
Speaker 1: a consumer level telescope, as Noel said, check out stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. We dive in depth
Speaker 1: to that. And what's interesting about what you're saying here, Nol,
Speaker 1: is that if we look back in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the boffins already had a very good grasp of what
Speaker 1: we would call germ theory, the danger of pathogens, the
Speaker 1: danger of bacteria, micro organisms, viruses. So the eggheads are asking,
Speaker 1: the moonheads are asking, what what if we land on
Speaker 1: the lunar surface and we run into an outbreak situation?
Speaker 1: What if we find something small that hitches the ride
Speaker 1: back to Earth and gets released in the ecosystem and
Speaker 1: it's an alien invasive species.
Speaker 2: And this is maybe the sprinkling of science fiction that
Speaker 2: we promised this idea of a moon plague, these alien
Speaker 2: pathogens brought back to your point, Ben, hitching a ride
Speaker 2: on the old Space Shuttle back to Earth, potentially causing
Speaker 2: some sort of catastrophic, potentially even extinction level event. The
Speaker 2: idea of back contamination was the same reason that the
Speaker 2: astronauts in the first three Apollo missions were kept in
Speaker 2: quarantine for three weeks upon their return. NASA spent quite
Speaker 2: a bit of money on this real or imagined problem,
Speaker 2: around seven point eight million or eighty million adjusted for inflation,
Speaker 2: in the form of eighty six thousand square foot lunar
Speaker 2: receiving laboratory at the Johnson Space Center there in Houston,
Speaker 2: as a place to quarantine the materials and the astronauts.
Speaker 2: This is also where the samples were processed in study,
Speaker 2: and one somewhat ethically dubious experiment that was carried out
Speaker 2: there involved feeding grains of lunar dust to mice, quail, quail,
Speaker 2: interesting and other life forms who were then monitored for
Speaker 2: any ill effects.
Speaker 1: Thankfully, Yeah, everything worked out, you know, uh, people, right,
Speaker 1: everything's great. Scientists were in fact astonished at good results,
Speaker 1: and they said, look, if you put plants in lunar soil,
Speaker 1: they they grow better, they thrive better than they would
Speaker 1: in earth soil. However, we're still very concerned about this
Speaker 1: idea of back contamination. So if you're a worker at
Speaker 1: the lunar receiving laboratory at the Johnson Space Center, you
Speaker 1: have to do the whole twelve monkeys thing. You have
Speaker 1: to be decontaminated. You got to strip off all your
Speaker 1: lab clothes, you got a shower, and then you can't
Speaker 1: put on your clothing right after your shower. Instead, you
Speaker 1: have to walk naked as atom through an ultraviolet lightmath
Speaker 1: and then you get to put on your street duds
Speaker 1: and exit. Ultimately, all of this effort was let's see
Speaker 1: it this way, it was a an error on the
Speaker 1: side of caution. It turned out there was no chemical
Speaker 1: evidence of life in any form from these lunar samples,
Speaker 1: so there was no insidious germ, microbe, bacteria, or virus.
Speaker 2: And I think we all aren't particularly mad at the
Speaker 2: idea of airing on the side of caution. There were
Speaker 2: a lot of unknowns in these early days, so good
Speaker 2: on you science for looking out for the rest of
Speaker 2: us here back on Earth. Man Jordan headlined this next
Speaker 2: section with a fabulous phrase, which is protect the rocks
Speaker 2: at all costs. The other challenge for NASA at this
Speaker 2: time was protecting those rocks at all costs from deterioration.
Speaker 2: These are very important artifacts, very valuable artifacts, very rare
Speaker 2: deterioration that is due to the oxygen and Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: As we mentioned, oxidization is the enemy of the Moon rock,
Speaker 2: the humble Moon rock. Exposure to air would cause these
Speaker 2: rocks to instantly start to deteriorate through that process of oxidization,
Speaker 2: which would both damage the rock and make it much
Speaker 2: less scientifically viable, if not entirely useless, because it was
Speaker 2: effectively contaminated at that point. Yeah. Yeah, because to the
Speaker 2: moon rocks, the Earth's atmosphere is the alien bit, right,
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the idea here is that the oxidization and
Speaker 1: would break down the chemical components, right, the overall mixtape
Speaker 1: of whatever lunar material means, It would break it down
Speaker 1: into an earthly thing, just a collection of stuff you
Speaker 1: can find on the planet today, So.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't be special anymore.
Speaker 1: Right, It's not Christmas every if it's Christmas every day.
Speaker 1: Decided to say so. They want to keep these samples
Speaker 1: chemically identical right control for variables chemically identical to what
Speaker 1: they were when they were on the moon. So they
Speaker 1: put in this quite strict, robust procedure for recovery. Let's
Speaker 1: say we're all astronauts, folks, you, Max, Noel and yours truly,
Speaker 1: we are at the moon. We are trying to get
Speaker 1: our moon stuff. And then we get the orders from
Speaker 1: mission control and misig Control tells us the following. They say, look,
Speaker 1: you got to take your fiberglass bag out with you
Speaker 1: on your moon walk, and then you've got to put
Speaker 1: your stuff in there. And then you've got to take
Speaker 1: your fiberglass bag and you've got to put it in
Speaker 1: a vacuum sealed metal container. And if we are the
Speaker 1: astronauts talking to Michig Control, we're going to be complaining.
Speaker 1: We'll say this smells like gunpowder. This is a weird vibe.
Speaker 2: I'm picturing these vacuum steel containers again, just with a
Speaker 2: sprinkling of sci fi as being those kind of cylinder
Speaker 2: type things that almost look like a giant thermos with
Speaker 2: the twisty top on it, and it makes it really satisfying,
Speaker 2: you know, when you close it perhaps some dry ice
Speaker 2: type steam comes out, you know, I love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is also the reason they are reporting this
Speaker 1: smell or us in this scenario, shout out the quizzard.
Speaker 1: We're reporting this smell of gunpowder in the spacecraft because
Speaker 1: the moon dust is on our suits and it is
Speaker 1: oxidizing when exposed to an earth like atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Can't save all the particles. We're gonna lose that dust
Speaker 2: to oxidization. But they did the best they could.
Speaker 1: And I love that you're pointing out that that awesome
Speaker 1: pH thermos idea with a canister, because there is a
Speaker 1: bigger canister at plate. We could say when this lunar
Speaker 1: material makes it back here to Tea, the fancy name
Speaker 1: for Earth. So instead of having a giant thermos, which
Speaker 1: would be an awesome idea, I'm laughing. I'm picturing a
Speaker 1: gigantic thermos somewhere in a space center, all right. So
Speaker 1: instead of building a giant thermos, there are clean rooms
Speaker 1: that essentially function the same way. They are some of
Speaker 1: the strictest clean rooms in the world. They have a
Speaker 1: small army of air filters, and these air filters ensure
Speaker 1: the room contains no more than get this folks one
Speaker 1: hundred particles larger than zero point five microns per cubic
Speaker 1: feet of air. No offense to anybody living in the
Speaker 1: fanciest place imaginable. This room is cleaner than your house.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean in comparison, typical indoor air might
Speaker 2: have as many as a million particles per cubic foot,
Speaker 2: likely more so for this clean room. Folks entering or
Speaker 2: required to wear contamination suits or decontamination suits rather. But
Speaker 2: even with these added precautions, the samples are still not
Speaker 2: handled directly. Researchers prepared the rocks in a vacuum sealed
Speaker 2: cabinet through those kind of gloves you might see in
Speaker 2: like a movie like Outbreak, you know, or You're through
Speaker 2: the Yeah, of course, multi layered gloves. High purity nitrogen
Speaker 2: is then pumped in to keep the samples completely free
Speaker 2: of moisture. Some of the practices are a little less
Speaker 2: high tech. They used some very uh commercially available like
Speaker 2: kitchen gadgets actually to slice these rocks. To bisect them,
Speaker 2: a Hobart Deli meat slicing machine a little bit modded
Speaker 2: out outfitted with a diamond edged blade.
Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Hobart Deli meat
Speaker 1: slicer pay extra for the diamond. Also, I think Nolan
Speaker 1: and I just forgot we are an audio podcast because folks,
Speaker 1: when we when we were agreeing about the gloves, we
Speaker 1: were talking about the glass in case that has you
Speaker 1: put gloves on yourself up to your forearms or wearing
Speaker 1: your suit obviously, and then you put those gloves into
Speaker 1: series vapatures that have their own gloves built into the container.
Speaker 1: I just didn't want us to miss that because we
Speaker 1: are an audio well well.
Speaker 2: And the visual that you missed maybe was Ben and
Speaker 2: I both reaching our arms out and wiggling our fingers
Speaker 2: at each other. That's the visual. There another low five
Speaker 2: technique I guess you could call it would be just
Speaker 2: cracking them open with the old rock hammer.
Speaker 1: You getting situations, you know what I mean. And this
Speaker 1: is the issue here. NASA went through a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of headaches, a lot of bureaucratic hoops to
Speaker 1: construct this facility and to establish these procedures, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, would later inform our friends in Soviet Russia
Speaker 1: and in China. NASA built the way to encounter this stuff.
Speaker 2: Can I just say I think it's incredible that they
Speaker 2: you know, with all this money, they did not even
Speaker 2: need to invent a new thing because Hobart already did
Speaker 2: it with their meat slicer. They were just like, Noah,
Speaker 2: it just needs a different blade. Have you? Are you
Speaker 2: aware been of the audio commentary for the DVD of
Speaker 2: the seminal nineteen nineties apocalyptic space movie Armageddon.
Speaker 1: I am lightly aware. I have not listened to it.
Speaker 2: Well, I've only heard clips. But the one that always
Speaker 2: makes the news's the internet, I guess is Ben Affleck
Speaker 2: did his own audio commentary. And you may remember famous
Speaker 2: scene where the space boffins kind of face off with
Speaker 2: the drill guys, you know, the burly rough and tumbled
Speaker 2: the drill team headed up by what's his name Bruce Willis,
Speaker 2: and Bruce Willis just dresses them down, saying you don't
Speaker 2: know a thing about drilling, and you know you did
Speaker 2: it all wrong, this, that, and the other. When they're
Speaker 2: presented with the space drill that the NASA guys have
Speaker 2: come up with, and he's just like, Ben Affleck just
Speaker 2: finds this whole scenario completely implausible and says he said
Speaker 2: to the director Jerry Bruckheimer, wouldn't it be easier to
Speaker 2: train astronauts to drill than to train drillers to be astronauts,
Speaker 2: and Jerry Bruckheimer's response, shut the fuck up.
Speaker 3: Yes, I remember that clip.
Speaker 1: Also, our Bruce Willis character here is probably gonna be
Speaker 1: the first lunar sample curator, a real job assigned to
Speaker 1: a gentleman named Elbert, a King, a dot king. He
Speaker 1: gets this first batch of moon rocks. He's supposed to
Speaker 1: curate these lunar samples. He is not impressed. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, he says, the moment was truly history, but
Speaker 1: there was little we could observe or say. We counted
Speaker 1: the rocks, we described the size.
Speaker 2: And shape of each piece. Put him down.
Speaker 1: But they look like lumps of charcoal in the bottom
Speaker 1: of a backyard barbecue grill. So Elbert Elbert is being
Speaker 1: a bit of a buskill. He's super not impressed. But
Speaker 1: this is super big for history, because since nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: the majority of what we can call American moon rocks
Speaker 1: have been stored at the Lunar Sample Laboratory facility over
Speaker 1: at the Johnson Space Center out in Houston.
Speaker 2: I do think it's funny to make the distinction of like,
Speaker 2: you know, American versus Russian versus Chinese moon rocks, because
Speaker 2: they're all moon rocks, y'all, and the moon doesn't belong
Speaker 2: to any of us.
Speaker 3: That's right. I was despite that.
Speaker 2: Flag we planted, you know.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, come on, fellow vex loologist in the crowd.
Speaker 1: Study years of flags. It's fun to put a flag
Speaker 1: on things.
Speaker 2: Everybody likes to put a flag on things, you know.
Speaker 2: But I'm just saying I think there were. It is
Speaker 2: widely understood that no one, there's no there's no there's
Speaker 2: no coling DIBs on the moon, right yeah.
Speaker 1: Right there. You're referring specifically to the Moon Treaty from
Speaker 1: the United Nations, or sometimes called the Moon Agreement. It
Speaker 1: was created on December eighteenth, nineteen seventy nine. Which is
Speaker 1: why eighty four percent or about six hundred pounds for
Speaker 1: everybody keeping note here, eighty four percent or six hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of quote unquote American moon rocks have been stored
Speaker 1: at this place in Houston. It's supposed to be like
Speaker 1: a doomsday vault. It can withstand one thousand years of
Speaker 1: being underwater. But this is where we get to the
Speaker 1: reason this episode is two part series. Noel, riddle me this.
Speaker 1: Where are the remaining sixteen percent of these American moon rocks?
Speaker 2: I'm so glad you asked, Ben. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: NASA adopted the don't put all your eggs in one
Speaker 2: basket approach, which I think we all can get behind.
Speaker 2: It's good to diversify, and secretly moved a one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty pound portion of this collection to another installation
Speaker 2: for safe keeping in the dead of night. Since two
Speaker 2: thousand and two, they've been stored at the White Sands
Speaker 2: Test Facility in New Mexico, which you may be familiar
Speaker 2: with from discussions of nuclear tests. Isn't that right, Ben,
Speaker 2: am I remembering the correct details from history on the
Speaker 2: White Sands Test Facility.
Speaker 3: You nailed it.
Speaker 1: You nailed it out there in New Mexico.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, over the years, samples of these rocks have been
Speaker 1: sort of farmed out or contracted out to a bunch
Speaker 1: of research teams across the planet. And these research teams
Speaker 1: are equal eggheads and boffins themselves. They're studying everything they
Speaker 1: can learn about these samples. Some of them have also
Speaker 1: been put into museums. Hashtag Indiana Jones it belongs in
Speaker 1: a museum you know you can find Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: find them displayed in the American Museum of Natural History
Speaker 1: in New York, which I know we both love. You
Speaker 1: can find them in the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Speaker 1: And another thing that we always recommend the Griffith Observatory
Speaker 1: out there in Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: Gosh, I love that place.
Speaker 2: I love it too, And they've got a really cool
Speaker 2: pendulum that kind of helps you visualize the rotation of
Speaker 2: the Earth. They have a Tesla coil out there that
Speaker 2: was featured in one of the Og Frankenstein films, and
Speaker 2: a really really cool old school classic planetarium show that
Speaker 2: is often given by aspiring actors. Really give it, they're
Speaker 2: all and you got to love that. It's also just
Speaker 2: a great hike up from the park at the foot
Speaker 2: of that climb up and up to the observatory itself.
Speaker 2: It's a really wonderful place, big fan.
Speaker 1: And we also have a pretty great planetarium here in
Speaker 1: our fair metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia. Please note, the folks
Speaker 1: narrating the planetarium over at Fern Bank are not aspiring actors.
Speaker 1: They are aspiring astronomers, and they're very weird people. We
Speaker 1: say that with great affection. Look, if you're traveling through
Speaker 1: one of these museums, you will see very small lunar fragments.
Speaker 1: They're going to be in vacuum cases. They're going to
Speaker 1: be embedded in resin. If you go to the Smithsodian
Speaker 1: National Air and Space Museum in Washington, d C. Well,
Speaker 1: you still can which is free. While you still can't,
Speaker 1: you're going to see one of the few moon rocks
Speaker 1: on the planet that people can touch. You can walk
Speaker 1: up to it and you can put your finger upon
Speaker 1: a thing from space.
Speaker 2: Indeed, we were talking about the Apollo scientist Farouk el Baz,
Speaker 2: who is inspired by his childhood pilgrimage to Mecca, the
Speaker 2: holy place where he himself was able to lay hands
Speaker 2: on a listen. I mean, I don't know. Moonrocks to
Speaker 2: some might be considered a sacred relic, but in this case,
Speaker 2: it was the blackstone. There at Mecca, the most important
Speaker 2: site to the Islamic faith. It is believed to have
Speaker 2: been sent down from the heavens, which I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's kind of poetic. There's a poetic parallel there. I mean,
Speaker 2: in a way, moon rocks are sent down from the heavens.
Speaker 2: I'm behind this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is why for many of us, fellow
Speaker 1: fans of space in space stuff, the idea of stealing
Speaker 1: a moon rock might seem heinous, might seem blasphemous.
Speaker 2: D it's a bit of like a national treasure type heights.
Speaker 2: You know, we're gonna steal the what is it, the
Speaker 2: Declaration of Independence? What do they steal? That's all right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 2: you're very right, Ben, there is something a little bit blasphemous,
Speaker 2: especially if you subscribe, as l Boz seems to have
Speaker 2: to this notion of moon rocks in some way being
Speaker 2: of the heavens, of the celestial bodies, and something that
Speaker 2: deserves a little more respect than our earthly rocks.
Speaker 1: And this is where we encounter the great crime. Shout
Speaker 1: out to our fellow rude dudes at ridiculous crime. If
Speaker 1: you like us, you'll love them, all right. So there's
Speaker 1: this guy named Richard, and this guy named Richard becomes.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah that yeah, blame blame old Tricky Dicky for
Speaker 2: a handful of things, including perhaps the moonrock heist. At
Speaker 2: the very least it happened on his watch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So moon rocks have gone missing, and a lot
Speaker 1: of this is due to the presidential administration of Tricky Dick.
Speaker 1: As he said, Noel or Richard Nixon. He was in office.
Speaker 1: He was potised during all of the Apollo mission landings.
Speaker 1: And given that the moon rocks are technically property of
Speaker 1: the US government, our buddy President Nixon has the final
Speaker 1: say over how they can or cannot be distributed. So
Speaker 1: during his administration, our buddy Nixon puts out these orders,
Speaker 1: and he orders fragments of the rocks from Apollo eleven
Speaker 1: and Apollo seventeen, specifically to be gifted to represents of
Speaker 1: each of the fifty states of the United States. And
Speaker 1: then he also gifts these two hundreds of foreign dignitaries
Speaker 1: around the world.
Speaker 3: They called the goodwilled moon rocks.
Speaker 2: It's like getting a piece of the Berlin Wall at
Speaker 2: a gift shop or something fantasier than that. There's a
Speaker 2: finite supply of both technically, but I'm also a little
Speaker 2: skeptical as to whether those pieces they sell us fridge
Speaker 2: magnets are in fact from the wall. So of the
Speaker 2: two hundred and seventy, like you said, Ben, so called
Speaker 2: goodwill moon rocks that were given away under Nixon's watch,
Speaker 2: around one hundred and eighty remain unaccounted for. That's right.
Speaker 2: Two thirds are just gone, like Kaiser SoSE in the Nights, lost, stolen, missing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are also by the way, folks, these
Speaker 1: are very small samples. They're less than a gram, So
Speaker 1: we're not defending the fact that they are lost. We
Speaker 1: are telling you they are easy to lose, right totally.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess I don't quite understand is there
Speaker 2: an issue here? These were given as like little keepsakes.
Speaker 2: There was no like tracking as to what the dignitaries
Speaker 2: did with them after the fact, right where they supposed
Speaker 2: to check in periodically as to whether whether their moon
Speaker 2: rock still was on their mantle or they made it
Speaker 2: into a keychain or something.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, how do you track it? That's a pretty
Speaker 1: good point, honestly, And it's interesting to look at the
Speaker 1: Soviet version of the matter, which we may do in
Speaker 1: a later episode, perhaps on stuff they don't want you
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: I guess it was up to the origin countries of
Speaker 2: the dignitaries as to how they would be. It was
Speaker 2: more maybe I'm over simplifying it or you know, being hyperbolic.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like they were meant to be the They
Speaker 2: were meant to be a gift to those countries, and
Speaker 2: then it was up to the dignitaries and said countries
Speaker 2: to decide how they might be displayed, whether or not
Speaker 2: they were worthy of that, et cetera. So we'll get
Speaker 2: into a little rundown of some of the tails, at
Speaker 2: least the interesting ones of those missing moon rocks around
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but also it was Nixon, and Nixon was not
Speaker 1: above greasing the wheels of geopolitics, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So he was sliding some stuff on the side. We
Speaker 1: actually we know in retrospect how many estimated pieces old
Speaker 1: Boy gave away, but he probably did a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff off the books. And luckily we know folks like
Speaker 1: Joseph Guntais, who has made it a mission to get
Speaker 1: these lunar rocks, lunar material, we should say, these small
Speaker 1: shards from the moon back to US management. And he's
Speaker 1: not playing around. He founded something called the Moon Rock Project,
Speaker 1: and he's an ex intelligence officer.
Speaker 2: Absolutely he always gets his man. And we haven't gotten
Speaker 2: to the point that maybe I've glazed over a little
Speaker 2: bit the monetary value of these items. These are not
Speaker 2: you know, paltry little trinkets. These things have you know,
Speaker 2: cash money value to them, and we're going to get
Speaker 2: to that. To date, he and his associates have tracked
Speaker 2: down seventy nine of the missing rocks, and I guess
Speaker 2: my earlier point, many of which were just found willy
Speaker 2: nilly in like memory boxes, the pro personal possessions of
Speaker 2: public officials who either forgot they had them, one of
Speaker 2: the most precious substances on the planet, as Jordan points out,
Speaker 2: or believed that they were the rightful owners, or so
Speaker 2: they claimed. So Ireland, here's a case of moonrock on
Speaker 2: display at Ireland was accidentally thrown away after a nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven fire at the observatory where it was held.
Speaker 2: The lunar sample was caught up amid the rubble and
Speaker 2: taken to a local landfill, where it apparently remains to
Speaker 2: this day. The investigator we mentioned gun Fights, gut Thigns.
Speaker 2: Gut Tigns, has described it as a pot of gold
Speaker 2: under a dump. You know, this reminds me that it reminds
Speaker 2: me of that guy that I guess bitcoin hard. He
Speaker 2: finally gave that search up after much ado trying to
Speaker 2: buy the dump and everything. Apparently it was like a
Speaker 2: billion dollars is worth essentially by today's value of bitcoin.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about Malta. I know you're a
Speaker 2: big Malta head.
Speaker 3: Are you a multi ball?
Speaker 2: Of course?
Speaker 1: So shout out to Joe by the way, he's got
Speaker 1: a very Indiana Jones approach. This is last time I'll
Speaker 1: say it. Wait, this is the second time I'll say it.
Speaker 1: I'll say it one more time in this series, Indiana Jones,
Speaker 1: it belongs in a museum.
Speaker 2: You know what's funny. I was one of my favorite podcasts,
Speaker 2: blank Check with Griffin and David recently did all of
Speaker 2: Stephen Spielberg's kind of mid to later career films. They
Speaker 2: do filmographies, and they did all the Indiana Jones movies,
Speaker 2: and they kind of pointed out how that whole it
Speaker 2: belongs in a museum. Attitude kind of falls by the
Speaker 2: wayside in terms of in these motivations as the series progresses,
Speaker 2: he seems a lot less interested as time goes on
Speaker 2: in the whole, like you know, preserving things for posterity
Speaker 2: and the greater good of the nation and science a
Speaker 2: little more focused on like making that money.
Speaker 3: And with that we do have.
Speaker 1: To say the Spielberg Indiana jones films are actually pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's even the bad ones.
Speaker 1: What's the what's the one you don't care for?
Speaker 2: Well, the Crystal Skull, I think is pretty universally considered
Speaker 2: to be the worst one. The most recent one about
Speaker 2: the what's it called antikathera mechanism situation dial of Destiny.
Speaker 2: People were a little iffy on that one, but I
Speaker 2: think it's more beloved than the Crystal Skull. People were
Speaker 2: just really mad about Shiaha both swinging from vines like
Speaker 2: a like an orangutan.
Speaker 1: What's your favorite Indiana Jonesville?
Speaker 2: I think my favorite is the Last Crusade. I really
Speaker 2: dig the relationship with the father son relationship in that one.
Speaker 2: I think it's it's really nice.
Speaker 1: They named the dog Indiana very well done. So it's
Speaker 1: May eighteenth, two thousand and four. Malta has a goodwill
Speaker 1: moon rock from the Nixon administration. This moon rock is
Speaker 1: stolen from their Museum of Natural History. Their Museum of
Speaker 1: Natural History, as are pal Josh Clark can confirm, has
Speaker 1: no security cameras. It has no real security like custodians
Speaker 1: even I think they had one janitor at the time,
Speaker 1: but they had a lot of budget cuts, funding shortages.
Speaker 1: Whomever this thief may be, they left behind the plaque
Speaker 1: and the Maltese flag that the Apollo astronauts had taken
Speaker 1: to the Moon with them.
Speaker 3: So this is where our.
Speaker 1: NASA investigator Joe comes in and he says, look at
Speaker 1: this he got He's so irritated at this point. He says,
Speaker 1: only an amateur would just steal the rock, because if
Speaker 1: we are trying to sell it on the black market,
Speaker 1: you would want the full set, you'd want the plaque,
Speaker 1: you'd want the flag. This would authenticate this thing that
Speaker 1: a lot of people who have not been to the
Speaker 1: Moon would otherwise assume is just regular rock and dirt
Speaker 1: from Earth. And so our buddy Joe goes back and
Speaker 1: forth with the authorities in Malta and he says, look,
Speaker 1: just tell them, whomever it may be, just tell them,
Speaker 1: no questions, ask drop off our little shard of moon rock.
Speaker 2: Just give it back. It belongs in a museum. I'm
Speaker 2: not going I said, you said you wouldn't say so,
Speaker 2: I wasn't going to say, yeah, this is perfect.
Speaker 1: And as we record today August twenty fifth, twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: the missing Malta Goodwill moon rock has yet to be recovered.
Speaker 2: Can I just say, I don't know that we didn't
Speaker 2: really line this up, and it seems to be the
Speaker 2: way that this is going. It seems like part one
Speaker 2: here is going to be kind of the history of
Speaker 2: moon rocks and the distribution of them and the sort
Speaker 2: of international affairs of it all. And this is its
Speaker 2: own little mini heighst or at the very least, the
Speaker 2: an Mia situation due to the incompetence, let's just say,
Speaker 2: of old Tricky Dicky. So lest you be irritated that
Speaker 2: we don't give you the promised heist, heist and the
Speaker 2: sex on the moon's off, that's all going to happen
Speaker 2: in part two. And I think it's an absolutely banger
Speaker 2: of a place to break.
Speaker 1: This, absolutely agreed. We also want to tell you two
Speaker 1: things before we end some more. As you said, incompetence,
Speaker 1: Spain while we're in Europe, let's stay in Spain. Spain
Speaker 1: had a moon rock from Apollo eleven, and it went
Speaker 1: missing because it was gifted to a guy you'll recognize
Speaker 1: from earlier, Francisco Franco.
Speaker 2: Not a good dude, not a good dude.
Speaker 1: What did Norm McDonald say. The more I learn about
Speaker 1: this guy, the less I like him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that does track a dict to a bit of
Speaker 2: a dictator and a bit of a dick. It's current
Speaker 2: whereabouts are unknown. Franco's grandson did claim, however, the family
Speaker 2: never intended to sell it, and suggested that it was
Speaker 2: just likely a bit of an oopsie and that it
Speaker 2: was lost. He said, as my mother is a woman
Speaker 2: with many things in many houses weird flex but okay
Speaker 2: in a move or redecorating a room in the end
Speaker 2: it must have gotten lost. Are bad but also sorry
Speaker 2: not sorry?
Speaker 3: Is the vibe bad?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, walk Walk Walk said that in two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine in an interview with El Mundo.
Speaker 1: Yes, and look, our guy has been searching for leads
Speaker 1: on this. Maybe he thinks, uh, private collector in Switzerland,
Speaker 1: where there are a lot of people who collect a
Speaker 1: lot of weird things. He got a nickname, Joe did
Speaker 1: in the Spanish press and they said, Joseph Gunties is
Speaker 1: the van helsing of Luna traffickers.
Speaker 2: Now that's interesting, the van helsing, because that implies to
Speaker 2: your earlier point, where wolfism or vampirism or some other
Speaker 2: kind of ism. I would have called him maybe more
Speaker 2: the Sherlock Holmes of Moon Rockery.
Speaker 1: Right with his deer hunter or deer stalker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, and his pipe and his cocaine. Dude, have
Speaker 2: I told you this. I've been recently listening to the
Speaker 2: entire works of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lock Holmes. It's a lot,
Speaker 2: by the way, and it's read by Stephen Frye, who
Speaker 2: we love from comedy and you know Britain. Sherlock Holmes
Speaker 2: did a lot of drugs. Yes, he was like shooting
Speaker 2: up morphine between his toes and snorting that cocaine. I mean,
Speaker 2: I had no idea. And I think the thing that
Speaker 2: I'm most tickled by every time it happens. It must
Speaker 2: just be an anachronistic expression of the time when someone
Speaker 2: talks about somebody exclaiming something they refer to it as
Speaker 2: he ejaculated. Yes, and I just I'm a child. It
Speaker 2: makes me titter every time I hear it.
Speaker 1: I have encountered something similar re listening to Like I've
Speaker 1: read Blood Meritigan by Cormack McCarthy, so he would.
Speaker 2: Say that that is exactly the kind of anachronistic biblical language.
Speaker 2: He loves.
Speaker 1: Hearing it in an audiobook version made me laugh aloud
Speaker 1: to the point where the folks on the plane had
Speaker 1: questions about me, but those questions were answered. We made
Speaker 1: it back to the States. We're gonna end part one
Speaker 1: of Sex on the Moon and the Great Moon Heist
Speaker 1: on a happy note. So back in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: there's this guy named Alan Rosen, and he's a business
Speaker 1: dude in Florida, and he goes to the black market
Speaker 1: and he somehow has possession of the goodwill moon Rock
Speaker 1: gifted to the nation of Honduras from the Apollo seventeen mission,
Speaker 1: and he says, this is going to be sold for
Speaker 1: five million dollars. And Uncle Sam did not like it
Speaker 1: so much so that we set up a steamed operation
Speaker 1: in a burst of creativity. Get this, he named it
Speaker 1: Operation Lunar Eclipse. A tad on the nose, A tad
Speaker 1: on the nose.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I get it, I get it, you know,
Speaker 2: But isn't that usually the case with these kind of
Speaker 2: operations that doesn't seem like creativity is always the strong
Speaker 2: suit of them. What name these types of stings? You know?
Speaker 1: I still fantasize about the idea of having a job
Speaker 1: where you are the person who just names secret operations.
Speaker 1: It feels so cool. It's like it's like the world
Speaker 1: of automotive, right, Like what if your job is just
Speaker 1: the name vehicles?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Like, how do you do that? Anyway?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it's
Speaker 2: done by committee. So Operation Munroch did yield some results
Speaker 2: and that the rock in question was recovered, and the
Speaker 2: origin of how it was you know, received, or how
Speaker 2: it got its way to Rosen was that he purchased
Speaker 2: it from the retur hired Honduran colonel Roberto Ugorcia Ugarte,
Speaker 2: who sold it to Rosen after disguising its origin. He
Speaker 2: was a little dishonest about how he came upon this moonrock,
Speaker 2: so Joseph Gundhines posing undercover. God, this guy is such
Speaker 2: a cool mm hm. He led the ops with the
Speaker 2: support from agencies including the US Postal Inspection Service never forget,
Speaker 2: never forget or underestimate, Rather the US Postal Inspection Service
Speaker 2: as well as Customs. They also had funding. You remember
Speaker 2: remember Ross Perot. I haven't heard that name in a minute.
Speaker 2: Forgot He had a first initial h ross Perot, well
Speaker 2: weird little guy, weird little dude who ran for president
Speaker 2: and was famously mocked on sn L I believe by
Speaker 2: Dana Carvey, who was the ross Perot the HS for
Speaker 2: Henry by the way, important important de So after a
Speaker 2: five year legal battle, the Moonrock was in fact returned
Speaker 2: to Honduras in two thousand and four and is now
Speaker 2: at the Centro Interactivo Chiminike in Tagusigalpa. Which is one
Speaker 2: of my favorite names of a place.
Speaker 3: That's what you're gonna say when you show up.
Speaker 1: You're gonna walk in and you're gonna say, this is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite names of a place to Goosy Gappa.
Speaker 2: Does it get much better? Well, it's it's just as silly,
Speaker 2: silly as it to Goosy Galpa.
Speaker 3: What could be better than this? We'll tell you right now.
Speaker 1: It's going to be part two of our continuing series
Speaker 1: of ridiculous heist involving lunar material. Now, the exploration of
Speaker 1: the Solar System goes back and forth, right, but it's
Speaker 1: a very human endeavor. It's incredibly important for anybody who
Speaker 1: would like to argue that space exploration is somehow a
Speaker 1: waste of time. Please remember that this applied science getting
Speaker 1: folks into orbit and indeed to the moon. It provides
Speaker 1: a lot of scientific breakthroughs that help your life today,
Speaker 1: things like velcro or tang or pens that right upside dout.
Speaker 1: And so with this we're going to call the today.
Speaker 1: We've got to also call our pal Joe and get
Speaker 1: up to date with him on the Moon Rock search.
Speaker 1: We're gonna save our Indiana Jones references for episode two.
Speaker 1: For now, we want to give a big thanks to
Speaker 1: our research associate Jordan Runta or super producer Max Williams. Noel,
Speaker 1: do we have a good nickname or a moniker for Jordan.
Speaker 2: Well, he's Jordan's Smoking moon Rocks in the Boondocks run Talk.
Speaker 3: I like the rhyme for sure.
Speaker 2: It's not mine. It's from the rapper Shad the god
Speaker 2: in the song moon Rocks, in the parlance of hip
Speaker 2: hop culture, is referred to a particular strain a very
Speaker 2: very very highly potent marijuana.
Speaker 3: No Ah, I've learned so much.
Speaker 1: Also thanks to Eve's Jeff Goat, Chris vossiotis here in
Speaker 1: spirit thanks to aj Bahama's Jacobs. We've got some guests
Speaker 1: coming up do we want to brag a little bit
Speaker 1: about them?
Speaker 2: I think we must. We do have a returning guest
Speaker 2: appearance from Ridiculous History alum Rachel Biggs Spinach Lance talking
Speaker 2: about some underwater explosions, which I'm quite excited about.
Speaker 1: Yes, and we are contractually required to say, with great reluctance,
Speaker 1: shout out to Jonathan Strickland, aka the Twister.
Speaker 2: He would have loved this episode. My boy's always high
Speaker 2: on moon rocks. I'm kidding, He's never touched the stuff.
Speaker 2: He's probably allergic. He would probably kill him.
Speaker 3: And still he's stealing moon rocks right now.
Speaker 2: I know it's true. He is much more of a
Speaker 2: despicable me type, steal the moon and all the rocks
Speaker 2: type figure than smoking them.
Speaker 1: So with great thanks, we are going to continue on
Speaker 1: our exploration of moon Heist. We hope that you will
Speaker 1: join us very soon. Unless you are the Quist No, yeah,
Speaker 1: we will see you next time.
Speaker 2: Folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.